Euphrates River Archives - IUVMPRESS

The Turkish army's recent attacks on Kurdish positions in the northern and border regions of Syria, namely Koban and Tell Abyad, have had a considerable impact on the ongoing fighting on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River.

“All terrorist units of ISIS on Syrian soil have been destroyed, and the territory is liberated,” Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov said.

“Therefore, as of today, there’s no territory controlled by ISIS in Syria,” he added. Gerasimov made the announcement during an annual briefing for foreign military attachés.

After being briefed on the successful military operation on both banks of the Euphrates River in Syria by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, President Vladimir Putin said that the political process and organization of the Syrian people’s congress in Sochi, agreed upon by Russia, Iran, and Turkey last month, must now become the focus. Among other goals, Putin named the drafting of a new constitution, and, eventually, parliamentary and presidential elections.

“Naturally, there might be some spots of resistance, but the military work has been largely completed in the area and at the time. Completed with a full victory, I repeat, with a victory and defeat of the terrorists,” Russian leader said.

The peace process, however, will be “a very big and lengthy job,” Putin cautioned. For this to happen though, the bloodshed in Syria must stop completely, he said. Securing the recent achievements and reinforcing the fragile de-escalation zones should be the first steps to that end, Russia’s president added.

Russia began providing support to Syria following an official request from Damascus in 2015 to prevent the terrorists from overrunning the country completely.

An array of foreign-backed militant and terrorist groups have been committing unprecedented atrocities in Syria since 2011.

Hundreds of Thousands have died and millions been displaced as a result of the insurgency with UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimating last August that more than 400,000 people had been killed in the crisis until then.

The Syrian government has repeatedly accused the US and some European countries including France and Britain of collaborating with some of their regional allies especially Saudi Arabia in arming and funding different terrorist groups in the country.

Upon his arrival on Tuesday, the Defense Secretary said that the ISIS terrorists have now come to a military dead end that presses them against the two sides of the Euphrates River where in one side stands Iraq and in the other side Syria.

Mattis visit came on the heels of his trip to Turkey that took him to discuss matters with the Turkish leaders. Later last week, the Turkish officials said that they expected the US Secretary of Defense’s trip to their country. Analysts suggest that the timing of the trip by itself is on the one hand signaling the US reaction to the Syrian developments that followed the mid-January three-party meeting of the Russian, Iranian, and Turkish diplomats in Moscow and the last week visit of the Iranian military chief to Ankara. On the other hand, the US seems to be trying to add to efforts to restore Ankara’s lost trust in Washington.

The US Defense Secretary’s visit to Turkey and then Iraq calls the attention as it comes just short after the Iranian army chief travelled to Turkey. Three days before Mattis Turkey visit, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey hosted Iran’s chief of staff General Mohamad Bagheri and he is expected to also host the Russian chief of staff Valery Gerasimov.

Many political experts maintain that such visits by Iranian and Russian military leaders to Turkey are paving the ground for establishing strategic security alliance between Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara before the upcoming Astana peace talks on Syria.

Despite the fact that the Department of Defense had told of the Mattis visit to take place earlier, but it is taking place right after the Iranian top military official’s visit to Ankara, signaling that it comes in form of an American reaction to the Iranian and Russian security trips to Ankara.

Perhaps a fear from emergence of a region alliance that gathers together Tehran, Moscow, and Ankara on the fighting of terrorism in Syria is the main drive provoking the American leaders to rush to attempts that they think will contribute to their aims to foil the possible joining of forces. But even if this is a reactionary step by Washington which wants to have hand in the upcoming Syrian developments, it must be said that the US lost the initiative at least in relation to Syria. The fact is that, the Syrian case that once was in the hands of the US and its regional allies is now held by a Russian-Iranian-Turkish axis and beyond the American power to manipulate. In such conditions, the Defense Secretary’s visit to Turkey comes while the US sees it inevitable to react more than being able to freely handle an initiative and decide which direction the developments of the Syrian crisis should go.

Trust-making trip

Before Mattis visit to the region, the Department of Defense issued a statement in which it outlined objectives of the trip. It stated that the trip will be taken as an opportunity to reiterate to Ankara the Washington commitment to alliance with Turkey as a significant ally and member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). But aside from the appeasing American steps, the US-Turkey differences at least on the Syrian Kurds, who are backed the US on the battlefield, remain firmly standing and show no signs of abatement as long as Washington keeps its support.

Turkey has been strongly lashing at the US for its backing for a coalition of Syria’s Kurdish militant groups serving under leadership of the Democratic Union Party (PYD). Ankara several times warned the US that its help to the Kurds was harmful to the Turkish national security.

The US administration is equipping People’s Protection Units (YPG), the military wing of the PYD, and is providing it with ground and air cover as it pushes to retake Raqqa, the ISIS’ Syria stronghold and the de facto capital of the terrorist group’s so-called caliphate. But Ankara blacklists YPG as a terrorist group as it recognizes the militant group as the Syrian affiliate of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Turkey’s archenemy against which the Turkish military has been fighting for over three decades.

This Turkish labeling has been a sticking point cracking the Ankara and Washington’s alliance in Syria. So far, the Turkish leaders showed resistance to the American pressures to soften stances on the Syrian Kurds. However, the unbending Turkish stance on the US sponsoring of the Kurdish fighters made Washington leaders to assure the Turkish officials that once the anti-ISIS campaign comes to an end, they will disarm the Kurds. Nevertheless, this assurance attempt appeared to be far from successful as Turkey every now and then urges the US to halt aids to the Kurdish forces.

The persistence of the gaps between the Turks and Americans despite Washington’s steps to assure Ankara can be blamed on the current distrust of the Turkish leadership in the US administration. The ongoing existence of distrust is clearly observable in Pentagon statement that pointed to trust-making goals behind the Mattis visit of Turkey. In fact, the Defense Secretary travels to push ahead the assurance efforts already started by other American officials.

Even if Turkey gets the necessary guarantees from the US, it has limitation taking the side of the US-led coalition in Syria because Ankara recently took practical steps towards joining the Russo-Iranian camp and that it makes its policy extraordinarily awkward to support Washington while standing on the opposite side. This makes Turkey’s mind divided between two options: further embracing the Moscow-Tehran camp or buying the American assurance. Choosing one will mean dropping the other.

The visit comes as Iraqi offensive launched Sunday to retake the town of Tal Afar, Islamic State’s last holdout in Nineveh province which the group held since 2014.

Mattis had previously said in statements in Amman that the battle against Islamic State militants was far from over, adding that following Tal Afar offensives, the Iraqi troop would aim at IS’s havens west of the Euphrates river.

The United States has led a military coalition of more than 60 world countries battling Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria. However it has the role of delaying the war and bombing the Syrian and the Iraqi forces for times.

“U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mattis, who will meet Abadi and Defense Minister Arfan al-Hayali, would discuss the future of U.S. forces in Iraq after the fall of the remaining cities under Islamic State and the role they could play in stabilizing operations.” Reuters said Tuesday.

The PMF forces that are mainly ruled by the people and were the base of Iraqi victories who believe the American participation has to get stopped for lots of reasons.

Iraqi forces have been battling IS militants who declared a “caliphate” rule in Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group lost its caliphate’s capital, Mosul, to Iraqi forces early July.

They lived in Tabqa, a small city on the banks of the Euphrates River in northern Syria. Then occupied by the Islamic State (ISIS, also known as Daesh), Tabqa was also under siege by U.S.-backed troops and being hit by daily artillery fire from U.S. Marines, as well as U.S.-led coalition airstrikes. The city, the second largest in Raqqa Province, was home to an airfield and the coveted Tabqa Dam. It was also the last place in the region the U.S.-backed forces needed to take before launching their much-anticipated offensive against the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, Raqqa.

His parents, Muhammed and Salam, had already fled their home once when the building adjacent to their house was bombed, Wassim Abdo told me in a recent interview. ISIS had been arresting civilians from their neighborhood for trying to flee the city. So on that Sunday, the couple was taking shelter on the second floor of a four-story flat along with other family members when a U.S.-led airstrike reportedly struck the front half of the building. Abdo’s sister-in-law Lama fled the structure with her two children and survived. But his parents and 12-year-old cousin were killed, along with dozens of their neighbors, as the concrete collapsed on them.

As an exiled human rights activist, Wassim Abdo only learned of his parents’ death three days later, after Lama called him from the Syrian border town of Kobane, where she and her two children had been transported for medical treatment. Her daughter had been wounded in the bombing and although the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led troops had by then seized control of Tabqa, it was impossible for her daughter to be treated in their hometown, because weeks of U.S.-led coalition bombing had destroyed all the hospitals in the city.

A War Against Civilians

Islamic State fighters have now essentially been defeated in Mosul after a nine-month, U.S.-backed campaign that destroyed significant parts of Iraq’s second largest city, killing up to 40,000 civilians and forcing as many as one million more people from their homes. Now, the United States is focusing its energies — and warplanes — on ISIS-occupied areas of eastern Syria in an offensive dubbed “Wrath of the Euphrates.”

The Islamic State’s brutal treatment of civilians in Syria has been well reported and publicized. And according to Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, the commander of the U.S.-led war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the battle to “liberate” these regions from ISIS is the “most precise campaign in the history of warfare.”

But reports and photographs from Syrian journalists and activists, as well as first-person accounts from those with family members living in areas under U.S. bombardment, detail a strikingly different tale of the American offensive — one that looks a lot less like a battle against the Islamic State and a lot more like a war on civilians.

These human rights groups and local reporters say that, across Syria in recent months, the U.S.-led coalition and U.S. Marines have bombed or shelled at least 12 schools, including primary schools and a girls’ high school; a health clinic and an obstetrics hospital; Raqqa’s Science College; residential neighborhoods; bakeries; post offices; a car wash; at least 15 mosques; a cultural center; a gas station; cars carrying civilians to the hospital; a funeral; water tanks; at least 15 bridges; a makeshift refugee camp; the ancient Rafiqah Wall that dates back to the eighth century; and an Internet café in Raqqa, where a Syrian media activist was killed as he was trying to smuggle news out of the besieged city.

The United States is now one of the deadliest warring parties in Syria. In May and June combined, the U.S.-led coalition killed more civilians than the Assad regime, the Russians, or ISIS, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization that has been monitoring the death toll and human rights violations in Syria since 2011.

“This administration wants to achieve a quick victory,” Dr. Fadel Abdul Ghany, chairman of the Syrian Network for Human Rights recently told me, referring to the Trump White House. “What we are noticing is that the U.S. is targeting and killing without taking into consideration the benefits for the military and the collateral damage for the civilians. This, of course, amounts to war crimes.”

And nowhere is this war against civilians more acute than in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, where trapped families are living under dozens of airstrikes every day.

Hotel of the Revolution

Located at the confluence of the Euphrates and Balikh rivers in northernSyria, Raqqa was first settled more than 5,000 years ago. By the late eighth century, it had grown into an imperial city, filled with orchards, palaces, canals, reception halls, and a hippodrome for horse racing. Its industrial quarters were then known as “the burning Raqqa,” thanks to the flames and thick smoke produced by its glass and ceramic furnaces. The city even served briefly as the capital of the vast Abbasid Empire stretching from North Africa to Central Asia.

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, wars between the Mongol and Mamluk empires annihilated Raqqa and its surrounding countryside. Every single resident of the city was either killed or expelled. According to Hamburg University professor Stefan Heidemann, who has worked on a number of excavations in and around Raqqa, the scorched-earth warfare was so extreme that not a single tree was left standing in the region.

Only in the middle of the twentieth century when irrigation from the Euphrates River allowed Raqqa’s countryside to flourish amid a global cotton boom did the city fully reemerge. In the 1970s, the region’s population again began to swell after then-President Hafez al-Assad — the father of the present Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad — ordered the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates about 30 miles upstream of Raqqa. Wassim Abdo’s father, Muhammed, was an employee at this dam. Like many of these workers and their families, he and Salam lived in Tabqa’s third neighborhood, which was filled with four-story apartment flats built in the 1970s not far from the dam and its power station.

Despite these agricultural and industrial developments, Raqqa remained a small provincial capital. Abdalaziz Alhamza, a cofounder of the watchdog group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which is made up of media activists from Raqqa living in the city as well as in exile, writes that the local news normally didn’t even mention the city in its weather forecasts.

In the mid-2000s, a drought began to wither the local cash crops: cotton, potatoes, rice, and tomatoes. As in other regions of Syria, farmers migrated from the countryside into the city, where overstretched and ill-functioning public services only exacerbated long-simmering dissatisfactions with the Assad regime.

As the 2011 rebellion broke out across Syria, Wassim Abdo and thousands of others in Raqqa, Tabqa, and nearby villages began agitating against the Syrian government, flooding the streets in protest and forming local coordinating councils. The regime slowly lost control of territory across the province. In March 2013, after only a few days of battle, anti-government rebels ousted government troops from the city and declared Raqqa the â€‹first â€‹liberated provincial capitalâ€‹ in all of Syria. The city, then the sixth largest in Syria, became “the hotel of the revolution.”

Within less than a year, however, despite fierce protests and opposition from its residents, ISIS fighters had fully occupied the city and the surrounding countryside. They declared Raqqa the capital of the Islamic State.

Despite the occupation, Wassim’s parents never tried to flee Tabqa because they hoped to reunite with one of their sons, Azad, who had been kidnapped by ISIS fighters in September 2013. In retirement, Muhammed Abdo opened a small electronics store. Salam was a housewife. Like tens of thousands of other civilians, they were living under ISIS occupation in Tabqa when, in the spring of 2017, U.S. Apache helicopters and warplanes first began appearingin the skies above the city. U.S. Marines armed with howitzers were deployed to the region. In late March, American helicopters airlifted hundreds of U.S.-backed troops from the Kurdish-led militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forcesâ€‹ to the banks of the dammed river near the city. Additional forces approached from the east, transported on American speedboats.

By the beginning of May, the Abdos’ neighborhood was under almost daily bombardment by the U.S.-led coalition forces. On May 3rd, coalition warplanes reportedly launched up to 30 airstrikes across Tabqa’s first, second, and third neighborhoods, striking homes and a fruit market and reportedly killing at least six civilians. The following night, another round of coalition airstrikes battered the first and third neighborhoods, reportedly killing at least seven civilians, including women and children. Separate airstrikes that same night near the city’s center reportedly killed another six to 12 civilians.

On May 7th, multiple bombs reportedly dropped by the U.S.-led coalition struck the building where Muhammed and Salam had taken shelter, killing them and their 12-year-old grandson. Three days later, the Syrian Democratic Forces announced that they had fully seized control of Tabqa and the dam. The militia and its U.S. advisers quickly set their sights east to the upcoming offensive in Raqqa.

But for the Abdo family, the tragedy continued. Muhammed and Salam’s bodies were buried beneath the collapsed apartment building. It took 15 days before Wassim’s brother Rashid could secure the heavy machinery required to extract them.

“Nobody could approach the corpses because of the disfigurement that had occurred and the smell emanating from them as a result of being left under the rubble for such a long period of time in the hot weather,” Wassim told me in a recent interview.

That same day their bodies were finally recovered. On May 23rd, his parents and nephew were buried in the Tabqa cemetery.

“In Raqqa There Are Many Causes of Death”

A few days after the Abdos’ funeral, the U.S.-led coalition began dropping leaflets over Raqqa instructing civilians to flee the city ahead of the upcoming offensive. According to photos of leaflets published by Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, the warnings read, in part, “This is your last chance… Failing to leave might lead to death.”

ISIS fighters, in turn, prohibited civilians from escaping the city and planted landmines in Raqqa’s outskirts. Nevertheless, on June 5th, dozens of civilians heeded the coalition’s warnings and gathered at a boat stand on the northern banks of the Euphrates, where they waited to be ferried out of the city. Before the war, families had picnicked along this riverbank. Teenagers jumped into the water from Raqqa’s Old Bridge, built in 1942 by British troops. A handful of river front cafés opened for the season.

“The river is the main monument of the city, and for many people there’s a romantic meaning to it,” Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, currently co-writing Brothers of the Gun, a book about life in ISIS-occupied Raqqa, told me.

But on June 5th, as the families were waiting to cross the river to escape the impending U.S.-backed offensive, coalition warplanes launched a barrage of airstrikes targeting the boats, reportedly massacring as many as 21 civilians. The coalition acknowledges launching 35 airstrikes that destroyed 68 boats between June 4th and June 6th, according to the journalistic outlet Airwars. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend later boasted about the tactic, tellingthe New York Times: “We shoot every boat we find.”

The day after the attack on fleeing civilians at the boat stand, the long-awaited U.S.-backed ground offensive officially began.

After three years of ISIS rule, Raqqa had become one of the most isolated cities in the world. The militants banned residents from having home internet, satellite dishes, or Wi-Fi hotspots. They arrested and killed local reporters and banned outside journalists. On the day U.S.-backed troops launched their ground offensive against the city, ISIS further sought to restrict reporting on conditions there by ordering the imminent shutdown of all Internet cafés.

Despite these restrictions, dozens of Syrian journalists and activists have risked and still risk their lives to smuggle information out of besieged Raqqa — and their efforts are the only reason most Western reporters (including myself) have any information about the war our countries are currently waging there.

Every day, these media activists funnel news out of the city to exiled Syrians running media outlets and human rights organizations. The most famous among these groups has become Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, which won the 2015 International Press Freedom Award for its reporting on the ISIS occupation and now publishes hourly updates on the U.S.-backed offensive. All this news is then compiled and cross-checked by international monitoring groups like Airwars, whose researchers have now found themselves tracking as many as a half-dozen coalition attacks resulting in civilian casualties every day.

It’s because of this work that we know the Raqqa offensive officially began on June 6th with a barrage of airstrikes and artillery shelling that reportedly hit a school, a train station, the immigration and passport building, a mosque, and multiple residential neighborhoods, killing between six and 13 civilians. Two days later, bombs, artillery shells, and white phosphorus were reportedly unleashed across Raqqa, hitting — among other places — the Al-Hason Net Internet café, killing a media activist and at least a dozen others. (That journalist was one of at least 26 media activists to be killed in Syria this year alone.) Other bombs reportedly hit at least eight shops and a mosque. Photosalso showed white phosphorus exploding over two residential neighborhoods.

White phosphorus is capable of burning human flesh to the bone. When exposed to oxygen, the chemical ignites reaching a temperature of 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s so flammable that its burns can reignite days later if the bandages are removed too soon.

U.S. military officials have not denied using white phosphorus in the city. The Pentagon has, in fact, published photos of U.S. Marines deployed to the Raqqa region transporting U.S.-manufactured white phosphorus munitions. Its spokesmen claim that the U.S. military only uses this incendiary agent to mark targets for air strikes or to create smoke screens and therefore remains in accordance with international law. But in the days after the reported attack, Amnesty International warned: “The US-led coalition’s use of white phosphorus munitions on the outskirts of al-Raqqa, Syria, is unlawful and may amount to a war crime.” (Amnesty similarly accused the U.S. of potentially committing war crimes during its campaign against ISIS in Mosul.)

Following the reported white phosphorus attacks on June 8th and 9th, Raqqa’s main commercial and social avenue — February 23rd Street — reportedly came under three straight days of bombing. Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, who grew up in that city, recalls how that street had once been lined with cafés, entertainment venues, and shops. Its western edge runs into Rashid Park, one of the city’s main public spaces. Its eastern edge stretches to the ancient Abbasid Wall.

Between June 9th and June 11th, as many as 10 civilians were killed in repeated bombings of February 23rd Street and its major intersections, according to reports compiled by Airwars. (These sorts of air strikes, ostensibly aimed at limiting the mobility of ISIS fighters, were also employed in Mosul, parts of which are now in ruins.) On those same days, four adults and four children were reportedly killed in airstrikes on Raqqa’s industrial district, another 21 civilians were killed in the west of the city, and at least 11 more civilians, again including children, when airstrikes reportedly destroyedhomes on al-Nour street, which is just around the corner from the al-Rayan Bakery, bombed less than two weeks later.

On that day, June 21st, a Raqqa resident named Abu Ahmad was returning from getting water at a nearby well when, he later told Reuters, he began hearing people screaming as houses crumbled. He said that as many as 30 people had died when the apartment flats around the bakery were leveled. “We couldn’t even do anything,” he added. “The rocket launchers, the warplanes. We left them to die under the rubble.” Only a few days earlier, coalition warplanes had destroyed another source of bread, the al-Nadeer bakery on al-Mansour Street, one of Raqqa’s oldest thoroughfares.

In July, the U.S.-led coalition bombed the ancient Abbasid Wall, and U.S.-backed troops breached Raqqa’s Old City. U.S. advisers began to operateinside Raqqa, calling in more airstrikes from there.

More and more names, photographs, and stories of the coalition’s victims were smuggled out by local journalists. According to these reports, on July 2nd, Jamila Ali al-Abdullah, her three children, and up to 10 of her neighbors were killed in her neighborhood. On July 3rd, at least three families were killed, including Yasser al-Abdullah and his four children, A’ssaf, Zain, Jude, and Rimas. On July 5th, an elderly man named Yasin died in an airstrike on al-Mansour Street. On July 6th, Anwar Hassan al-Hariri was killed along with her son Mohammed, her daughter Shatha, and her toddler Jana. Five members of the al-Sayyed family perished on July 7th. Sisters Hazar and Elhan Abdul Aader Shashan died in their home on July 12th, while seven members of the Ba’anat family were killed on July 13th, as was Marwan al-Salama and at least ten of his family members on July 17th.

Hundreds more were reportedly wounded, including Isma’il Ali al-Thlaji, a child who lost his eyesight and his right hand. And these are, of course, only some of the reported names of those killed by the U.S.-led coalition.

“In Raqqa, there are many causes of death,” the journalists at Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently wrote. These include “indiscriminate airstrikes by international coalition warplanes, daily artillery shelling by Syrian Democratic Forces, and ISIS mines scattered throughout the surrounding landscape.”

For those who survive, conditions inside the city only continue to worsen. Coalition bombing reportedly destroyed the two main pipes carrying water into the city in the 100-degree July heat, forcing people to venture to the banks of the Euphrates, where at least 27 have been reportedly killed by U.S.-led bombing while filling up jugs of water.

A Coalition in Name Only

The United States has launched nearly 95% of all coalition airstrikes in Syria in recent months, meaning the campaign is, in fact, almost exclusively an American affair. “The French and British are launching about half a dozen strikes a week now,” Chris Woods, director of Airwars, explained to me. “The Belgians maybe one or two a week.” In comparison, in Raqqa province last month the U.S. launched about twenty air or artillery strikes every single day.

In June alone, the U.S.-led coalition and U.S. Marines fired or dropped approximately 4,400 munitions on Raqqa and its surrounding villages. According to Mark Hiznay, the associate director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division, these munitions included 250-pound precision-guided small diameter bombs, as well as MK-80 bombs, which weigh between 500 and 2,000 pounds and are equipped with precision-guided kits. The bombs are dropped by B-52 bombers and other warplanes, most taking off from the al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, or the USS George H.W. Bush, an aircraft carrier stationed off Syria’s coast in the eastern Mediterranean.

Hundreds of U.S. Marines, most likely from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, are also positioned outside Raqqa and are firing high explosive artillery rounds into the city from M777 Howitzers. In late June, the Marines’ official Twitter feed boasted that they were conducting artillery fire in support of U.S.-backed troops 24 hours a day.

The result of this type of warfare, says Airwars’ Chris Woods, is a staggering increase in civilian casualties. According to an analysis by the group, since President Trump took office six months ago, the U.S.-led campaign has reportedly killed nearly as many civilians in Syria and Iraq as were killed in the previous two and a half years of the Obama administration.

And for surviving civilians, the conditions of war don’t end once the bombing stops, as life today in the city of Tabqa indicates.

As of mid-July, according to Wassim Abdo, Tabqa still has neither running water nor electricity, even though displaced families have begun returning to their homes. There’s a shortage of bread, and still no functioning schools or hospitals. The Tabqa Dam, which once generated up to 20% of Syria’s electricity, remains inoperable. (U.S.-led coalition airstrikes reportedly damaged the structure repeatedly in February and March, when they burnedthe main control room, causing the United Nations to warn of a threat of catastrophic flooding downstream.) The U.S.-backed troops in Tabqa have, according to Abdo, banned the Internet and U.S. officials admit that children in the area are being infected by diseases carried by flies feeding off corpses still buried in the rubble.

Meanwhile, less than 30 miles to the east, the battle for control of Raqqa continues with tens of thousands of civilians still trapped inside the besieged city. Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend has indicated that the U.S.-led coalition may soon increase the rate of airstrikes there yet again.

From Wassim Abdo’s perspective, that coalition campaign in Syria has so far killed his parents and nephew and ruined his hometown. None of this, understandably, looks anything like a war against ISIS.

“My opinion of the international coalition,” he told me recently, “is that it’s a performance by the international community to target civilians and infrastructure and to destroy the country.” And this type of warfare, he added, “is not part of eliminating Daesh.”

Warning about new Turkish military offensive in Syria came after a post on Twitter by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that read: “We tell the world that Turkey will never allow the establishment of a Kurdish state in northern Syria.”

Yeni Safak newspaper, close to Turkish government, a couple of days before the president’s Twitter post had reported that the country’s army was bracing for an offensive against the Afrin canton, one of the three Kurdish cantons in northern Syria administered autonomously by the Kurdish forces. The Turkish daily further said that the preparations for the operation had been going in a surprising pace and that they were close to ending.

Last week, the Turkish Defense Minister Fikri Isik said that Turkey will not hesitate to carry out military operations in Afrin canton if Ankara saw it necessary.

The Turkish propaganda beside its military moves in Syria have so far aroused the ire of the Kurds. The Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in a statement published a couple of days ago said that the Turkish forces were amassed behind the northern Syria borders and appeared waiting orders from officials to start an invasion on Afrin. They stated that the expected operation, possibly codenamed Euphrates Sword, was going to take place in association with Syrian armed opposition factions.

The Afrin canton is one of the three Kurdish-administered cities in northern Syria. The armed Kurdish forces seized control of Afrin after Syrian government forces pulled out of the city in 2012.

Located precisely in northwestern Syria, Afrin is geographically disconnected from the other two cantons of Kobani and Island. A coalition of militant forces, led by the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), crossed the Euphrates River in January 2016 and captured the Kurdish-inhabited town of Manbij. They struggled to advance towards Afrin to link the three independently-run cantons.

In response to the Kurdish advances towards Afrin, Turkey launched Operation Euphrates Shield in August. The campaign majorly backed the combatants of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) militant group that seized Jarablus town and so foiled the Kurdish plans. Jarablus is located between Afrin and the other two Kurdish cantons.

Afterwards, Turkey intended to progress eastward to take control of Manbij but declined to continue as it faced the US reluctance as well as Russian and Syrian opposition.

Ankara has focused its threats of fresh military operation against the Kurds this time on Afrin possibly because it failed to persuade Washington to stop arming the Kurdish forces operating in northeastern Syria. Turkey appears to be seeking further closeness to Russia to serve its Syria goals through pressing the US.

On the other side, Russia has declined to transparently address the fresh Turkish offensive threats as its main intention is to see all of Syrian territories returning under rule of the central government. Some sources have talked about a deal struck between Ankara and Moscow according to which Turkey will work with Russia to fully retake Idlib in return for the Russian disregard of probably imminent Turkish campaign in Afrin. Some analysts talk about the Russian plan to put strains on the Syrian Kurds through Turkey to have them hand over their territories to the Syrian government.

Abd Salah Ali, the PYD envoy to Russia, has recently criticized Russia, saying that Kremlin’s stances on the threats of Turkish campaign in Afrin were “contradictory.” He further said that the Russian posture on the possible Turkey offensive in the Kurdish canton was not clear.

“They say that we oppose any foreign military intervention in Syria but in practice they only care about the priorities of the Syrian government. I think that Russia facilitates Turkish attacks on Afrin to push us for something to do,” Ali said.

The Russian policy appears to be yielding the desired results as the Kurdish leaders have recently talked about Afrin handover to the Syrian government to steer clear of its falling target to Turkey’s offensive.

Salih Muslim Muhammad, the co-chairman of the PYD, earlier maintained that if Russia and the US decline to curb possible Turkish campaign in Afrin, his forces will give the city back to the Syrian army as they did in Manbij.

“Afrin is a Syrian territory and we will not allow Turkey occupy even an inch of it,” the Syrian Kurdish leader asserted.

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